Spreaders for particulate material have many uses, and exist in widely diverse configurations. Such spreaders can be mounted on stationary structures for repeatedly spreading material over the same area, or can be mounted for movement such as on or by a vehicle, for selectively spreading material over different areas as directed by movement of the vehicle or parts thereof. For example, sand and road salt spreaders are commonly attached to the back of highway maintenance trucks for spreading the sand or salt over icy or slippery road surfaces. Other applications, as for example in the agricultural, dairy and livestock industries use mobile spreaders for dispersing bedding materials such as wood shavings, chopped straw or sawdust in animal shelters and barn stalls. Such spreaders may be attached to scoops or buckets that are attached to and moved by tractors, skid steered vehicles, or the like. Such spreading equipment can also be used for spreading other particulate materials such as feed corn or grains in animal feed lots, for grain tanks, or for spreading top soil or other particulate landscape materials.
In most such mobile spreading structures, the actual spreader mechanism is generally operatively attached to a movable vessel or container that is configured to retainably hold a quantity or charge of the material to be dispensed. The vessel could, for example, be the bed of a dump truck, a towed trailer bed or tank, or a bucket of a tractor, a front-end loader, or a skid steer vehicle. Such vessels are generally configured to tip or otherwise be moved in a manner such that the material carried thereby is movable within the vessel toward and into an adjacent spreading apparatus. For example, a load of sand carried by a highway maintenance dump truck bed typically slides by gravity toward the back of the truck bed as the bed is raised, and into a spreader mechanism located at the back of the truck. The spreader mechanism typically includes a movable disk or vane member that is rotatable about a generally vertical axis and flings or throws material dropped onto it outwardly in broadcasting dispersing manner away from the spreader, such as across a highway surface behind the truck.
A common problem associated with such vessel supplied spreading equipment is the bridging of the material carried by the vessel as the material is directed by gravity out of the vessel and into the spreader mechanism. In the process of moving along and out of the containment vessel, the material to be spread is generally required to pass through a narrowed-down portion of the vessel or through an outlet port thereof leading to the spreader apparatus. Such material flow restriction and the general cohesive nature of the material to be spread further encourages bridging of the material within the vessel, at a position spaced upwardly from the vessel outlet and the spreader apparatus inlet, thereby disruptively interrupting the spreading process.
One way of breaking the bridged dams of material within the containment vessel is to bang or jerk the vessel body so as to dislodge the bridged material. This process is undesirable, unreliable and not particularly effective in situations where the apparatus operator cannot readily or continually observe the vessel contents during the spreading operation, and may be unaware of a material bridging situation. Another technique that has been employed with tractor or loader buckets has been to fixedly mount an auger adjacent the lower inside surface of the bucket to both direct the material laterally to a spreader located at one end of the bucket and in an attempt to address the bridging problem in the bucket. Such augers did generally not solve the material bridging problems of such buckets, which now enabled the material to bridge at a position overlying the auger surface. The next attempted solution was to place a second or multiple rotatable paddle wheels or beater structures within the bucket, spaced upwardly from and overlying the lower auger in generally parallel manner, to continually move and agitate the material overlying the auger in hope of minimizing bridging thereof. Such systems are generally expensive, are fairly complex and high maintenance structures, and still do not work well or efficiently.
The present invention addresses the described deficiencies of prior art vessel material containment and spreader combination configurations by providing a relatively simple, reliable and cost effective material dispensing and method that minimizes material bridging within the vessel and provides for uniform and smooth spreading dispersal of the material from the vessel.